2. Keeping your tracks on track

Your station’s on air, but your listeners might just be expecting to hear more than that one song you uploaded earlier. Your media library is going to grow, and fast. You’ll need ways to manage it with ease.

Your media library should never be a crowded attic. Instead it should be a neatly labeled record shelf you can actually use.

In this guide, you’ll learn the core functionality for organising your media library in Radio Cult. Once you’re done with this help article, you’ll know:

1. What tags are and how to tag your tracks, and
2. How to perform bulk actions on your tracks.

Let’s get every track in its place on that record shelf.

What are tags

Tags in Radio Cult aren’t just labels - they’re one of the most powerful tools for keeping your station organised and making automation work for you.

Media organisation

Think of tags as a super-flexible filing system for your tracks. You can give any piece of media as many tags as you want, which makes it easy to:

• Filter and search your library,
• Group related files by genre, mood, show segment, or whatever else makes sense, and
• Find exactly what you need, even when your library’s overflowing.

Broadcast automation

Tags aren’t just for tidying up - they can also run your broadcasts for you. You can assign tags to playlists so that, when the playlist runs, your station will randomly pull and play matching media. This means you can skip the track-by-track curation. Just tag your tracks, link those tags to a playlist, and schedule it. Job done.

We’ll get into all the clever automation tricks tags can pull off in a later article though.

Good to know

When you upload a track with the Upload Media button, you can organise it right there. The upload window includes Apply tags and Add to playlists options, so a track can arrive already tagged and slotted into the right playlists, saving you doing it separately afterwards. You can assign up to 5 tags and 5 playlists during upload.

Creating your first tag

Now you know what tags are, it's time to get your toes wet and create your very first tag.

There’s actually more than one way to create a tag in Radio Cult. The method we’ll describe below is useful for demonstrating how tags interact with your tracks.

1. In the left hand navigation, click Tracks under the Media section.

2. In the Tags column, click the cell for the track you want to tag.

3. Click the Create tag button.

4. Enter a name for your tag, then click the Confirm (tick) button.

Pat yourself on the back - you’ve just created your first tag. But with one more step to add your first tag to a track, your back will be owed another pat.

Adding your first tag to a track

A tag not assigned to any tracks is like a label stuck on an empty shelf - it’s there, but it’s not helping you find anything.

Let’s change that

1. With the Tags dropdown still open, click the tag you just created to apply it to the track.

Nice! Your first track has been tagged and now it’s time to cash in on that second back pat.

Searching tracks by tag(s)

Using tags to search is like having a smart librarian who knows exactly which shelves hold the tracks you want. Just select one or more tags, and boom - you get a filtered view showing only the tracks that live on those shelves.

Let’s see the tag(s) search functionality in action.

1. Click the Tag filter above the tracks list.

2. Select the tag(s) you want to filter by.

That’s that - you should now be seeing every track you’ve tagged with the selected tag.

To clear the filter (or any other), click the Clear filters button.

Adding a tag to multiple tracks

After reading the last section on adding a tag to a single track, you can probably imagine how tedious it could be to repeat that process over and over for dozens of tracks. Nobody wants to spend their afternoon tagging one track at a time.

That’s where bulk tagging comes in. Instead of pulling each record off the shelf individually to stick the same label on it, you can grab the whole stack and tag them all in one go.

Select the tracks you want, choose your tag, and apply it. Just like that, your chosen label is stamped across the whole group - no repetitive clicking, no wasted time.

1. Select the tracks you want to tag by ticking their checkboxes.

2. In the selection bar that appears, click Add tags.

3. Click the tag(s) you want to apply.

Huzzah - you’ve now learnt how to tag multiple tracks at the same time.

The other bulk actions we support

If it would be tedious to tag a track one at a time, then it would be no different adding a track to a playlist one at a time.

So not only do we support bulk tagging of tracks, we also provide these other bulk actions for you to manage your media library with ease:

• Adding multiple tracks to a playlist.
• Editing multiple tracks, and
• Deleting and force deleting multiple tracks.

Adding multiple tracks to a playlist

1. Select the tracks you want to add, as before.

2. Click the Add to playlist button.

3. Click the playlist(s) you want to add them to.

Editing multiple tracks

1. Select the tracks you want to edit, as before.

2. Click the Edit button to open the Update details window.

You can update the following fields for the selected tracks:

• Artwork,
• Artist,
• Album,
• ISRC,
• Label, and
• Year.

For each field, you can:

• Enter a new value: this applies it to every selected track. Fields left on Keep as is are untouched.
• Click Clear value: this removes the existing value for that field from every selected track.

3. Make your changes.

4. Click the Update files button (it shows the number selected, for example Update 3 files).

Deleting and force deleting multiple tracks

Deleting multiple tracks is straightforward. Normally, if any selected tracks are part of a playlist, you’ll see a warning before confirming deletion. Force deleting skips this step - no warnings, just immediate removal of the tracks from your account, whether or not they’re in a playlist.

1. Select the tracks you want to delete, as before.

2. Click the Delete button, or the Force delete button to also remove them from any playlists they’re in.

3. In the confirmation window, click the Delete tracks button.

If you clicked Delete and some tracks are still in a playlist, they can’t be deleted yet. Click Force delete to remove them from every playlist and delete them, or Keep to leave them.

Alrighty - with all that said you should now be able to keep your media library as tidy and organised as your heart desires.

Currently, your media library in all likelihood won’t be particularly overwhelming. But even if your station only broadcasts a single genre of music, the world has produced so much audio content that having a library of hundreds of tracks is more than likely. However, your new found knowledge of the above functionality should ensure that managing a media library of that size (or even bigger ones) is never a daunting task.

Your understanding of what Radio Cult has to offer your station has certainly grown. But there’s still more to go to get the most out of the platform. So click here to learn more.